Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet
Economics and Culture, Media and Community,
Open Source

In-room Chat as a Social Tool

This fall, I hosted a two-day brainstorming session for 30 or so
people on the subject of social software. The event, sponsored by
Cap-Gemini's Center for Business Innovation and Nokia's Insight and
Foresight unit, took place in an open loft, and in addition to the
usual "sit around a big table and talk to each other" format, we
set up an in-room chat channel accessible over the WiFi network. We
hosted the chat using Greg Elin's modifications to Manuel Kiessling's
lovely ARSC (A
Really Simple Chat) software. (Greg and I had used a similar
setup in a somewhat different setting, and we were determined to
experiment further at the social software event.)

The in-room chat created a two-channel experience -- a live
conversation in the room, and an overlapping real-time text
conversation. The experiment was a strong net positive for the
group. Most social software is designed as a replacement for
face-to-face meetings, but the spread of permanet -- connectivity like
air -- provides opportunities for social software to be used by groups
who are already gathered in the same location. For us, the chat served
as a kind of social whiteboard. In this note, I want to detail what
worked and why, what the limitations and downsides of in-room chat
were, and point out possible future avenues for exploration.

THE SETUP

The setup was quite simple. We were working in a large open loft,
seated around a ring of tables, and we connected a WiFi hub to the
room's cable modem. Most of the participants had WiFi-capable laptops,
and ARSC works in a browser, so there were no client issues. We put a
large plasma screen at one end of the room.

We created a chat room for the event, and asked the participants using
the chat to log in using their first name. In addition, we created a
special username, Display, which we logged into a machine connected to
the plasma screen. The Display interface had no text-entry field,
suppressed control messages, and had its font set very large. This
maximized screen real estate for user-entered messages, and made them
readable even by participants sitting 10 meters away (though it
minimized the amount of scroll-back visible on the plasma screen.)

We made the participants aware of the chat room at the beginning of the
event, and set no other rules for its use (though at one point, we asked
that people only use the chat room, saying nothing out loud for half
an hour.) The chat room was available throughout the meeting. The first 10
minutes of the chat were the usual set of test messages, hellos, and other
"My hovercraft is full of eels" randomness, but once the meeting got
rolling, the chat room became an invaluable tool.

THE ADVANTAGES

The chat room created several advantages.

1. It changed interrupt logic.

Group conversations are exercises in managing interruptions. When
someone is speaking, the listeners are often balancing the pressure to
be polite with a desire to interrupt, whether to add material, correct
or contradict the speaker, or introduce an entirely new theme. These
interruptions are often tangential, and can lead to still more
interruptions or follow-up comments by still other listeners.
Furthermore, conversations that proceed by interruption are governed
by the people best at interrupting. People who are shy, polite, or
like to take a moment to compose their thoughts before speaking are at
a disadvantage.

Even with these downsides, however, the tangents can be quite
valuable, so if an absolute "no interrupt" rule were enforced, at
least some material of general interest would be lost, and the
frustration level among the participants consigned solely to passive
listening would rise considerably.

The chat room undid these effects, because participants could add to
the conversation without interrupting, and the group could pursue
tangential material in the chat room while listening in the real
room. It was remarkable how much easier it was for the speaker to
finish a complex thought without being cut off. And because chat
participants had no way of interrupting one another in the chat room,
even people not given to speaking out loud could participate. Indeed,
one of our most active participants contributed a considerable amount
of high-quality observation and annotation while saying almost nothing
out loud for two days.

2. "Note to self" became "Note to world"

The more successful a meeting, the more "note to self" moments happen,
where a light goes off in someone's head, and they are moved to write
the insight down for later examination. The chat channel provided an
interesting alternative to personal note-taking, which was group
note-taking. By entering "notes to self" into the chat, participants
could both archive thoughts (the chat was logged) and to share those
thoughts with the rest of the room to see what reactions they might spark.
This is slightly different than simply altering interrupt logic, and
more along the lines of Cory Doctorow's "outboard brain" idea, because
in this case, the chat was capturing material that would not otherwise
have been shared with the group.

3. High-quality text annotation

What the spoken word has in emotive quality, it lacks in precision.
Much interesting material thrown out during the course of group
conversations is difficult to capture in an ideal form. When taking
notes, it's easy to misspell a name or mis-punctuate a URL, and things
committed solely to memory can be difficult to retrieve later
("Somebody said something about a researcher in Oregon? Uraguay? The
name began with a G..."). Comments in the chat log solved these
problems -- if the attendees were talking about Gerd Korteum's work,
or the Kuro5hin website, the spelling and punctuation were
unambiguous.

There were two additional effects that improved the quality of the
text annotation. Because everyone was connected to the web, not just
the local chat, the participants could google for websites and quotes
before they posted. (At one point during the Friday session, a fierce
rain started, and someone pasted the US Weather service advisory for
the area into the chat.) And because ARSC turns URLs into links, the
rest of the group could click on a link in the chat window when it was
added, so that new material could be glanced at and bookmarked in
context, rather than hours or days later.

The annotation was also affected by the one-way relation between
the real world conversation and the chat. Though it's too early to know
whether this was a bug or a feature, themes from the real world
conversation were constantly reflected in the chat room, but almost
never vice-versa. This suggests that the participants regarded the
chat as a place for ancilliary comments, rather than a separate but
equal conversational space.

4. Less whispering, more \whisper ing

People whisper to one another during conferences, sometimes for good
reasons ("What does UDDI mean?") and sometimes for not-so-good ones
("So this Estonian guy goes into a bar..."). Like interrupting,
however, a blanket "No whispering" ban would throw the good out with
the bad, and would reduce the quality of the experience for the
attendees. Furthermore, even when there is a good reason to whisper
to someone, the larger the conference, the likelier it is you won't be
seated next to them.

The \whisper command in ARSC means that, topologically, everyone is
seated next to everyone else. By typing "\whisper Rusty', a
participant could send a point-to-point message to Rusty without
disrupting the meeting. Though the whisper's weren't logged, an
informal poll at the end of the second day showed that a large
majority of chat room participants had used \whisper at some point.

Ironically, the effectiveness of the \whisper command was somewhat
limited by the "split screen" focus between the room and the
chat. Because \whisper requests went to the invitees laptop, if
someone was looking away from their screen for a few minutes, they
would miss the invitation, since \whisper requests didn't go to the
plasma screen. One user suggested the addition of a \pssst function of
some sort to get someone's attention. Another possibility would be
making a second \whisper-only window, so that \whisper conversations
could be more asynchronous.

5. Alleviated boredom.

Groups of people have diverse interests, so no matter how generally
scintillating a meeting overall, at some point someone is going to
find the subject at hand dull. The in-room chat helped alleviate this
boredom, while keeping the participants talking to one another about
the subject at hand.

This is the advantage hardest to understand in the abstract. When I
talk about the in-room chat, people often ask "But isn't that
distracting? Don't you want to make people pay attention to the
speaker?" This is similar to the question from the early days of the
Web: "But why have any outside links at all? Don't you want to make
people stay on your site?"

Once you assume permanet, whether from Wifi, Richochet, or GPRS, this
logic crumbles. Anyone with a laptop or phone can, if they are bored,
turn to the internet, and the question becomes "Given that attendees
will be using the network, would you rather have them talking to one
another, or reading Slashdot?" The people who gathered in NYC came to
converse with one another, and the in-room chat provided a way for
them to meet that goal even when they were not riveted by the main
event.

THE CONTEXT

Chat as a meeting tool isn't a universally good idea, of course.
Every successful use of social software has environmental factors
working in its favor.

First and foremost, the attendees were tech-savvy people who travel
with WiFi capable laptops and think about novel uses of social
software, so they were inclined to want to use something like ARSC,
even if only as an experiment. There was no resistance to trying
something so odd and unproven, as there might be in less techie
groups.

The group was also self-motivated. Because their attendance was
optional, they largely stayed on-topic. One can easily imagine that in
a meeting where attendance is passive and forced ("The boss wants
everyone in the conference room at 5:45") the contents of the chat
would be much more tangential (to say nothing of libelous.) Since most
parlimentary rules, whether formal or informal, begin with the premise
that only one person can speak at once, and then arrange elaborate
rules for determining who can speak when, the presence of an alternate
channel could severely disrupt highly structured meetings such as
client conferences or legal negotiations. Whether this would be a bug
or a feature depends on your point of view.

The goals of the meeting were in synch with the experience the chat room
offered. We were not trying to forge a working group, get to consensus, or
even converge on a small set of ideas. Indeed, the goals of the meeting
were explicitly divergent, trying to uncover and share as much new
material as possible in a short period. The chat room aided this goal
admirably.

The scale of the meeting also worked in our favor. The group was large
enough that sitting around a table with a laptop open wasn't rude or
disruptive, but small enough that everyone could use a single chat room.
At one point during the Saturday session, we broke into small groups to
brainstorm around specific problems, and though there was no explicit
request to do so, every single member of the group shut their laptop
screens for two hours. Groups of 6 are small enough that all the members
can feel engaged with the group, and the chat would have been much less
useful and much more rude in that setting.

On the other hand, whenever things got really active on the chat channel
(we averaged about 4 posts a minute, but it sometimes spiked to 10 or so),
people complained about the lack of threading, suggesting that 30 was at
or near an upper limit for participation.

MEETING STRUCTURE

There were also some more technical or formal aspects of the meeting
that worked in our favor.

The plasma screen showing the Display view was surprisingly
important. We had not announced the WiFi network or chat channel in
advance, and we had no idea how many people would bring WiFi-capable
laptops. (As it turned out, most did.) The plasma screen was there to
share the chat room's content's with the disconnected members.
However, the screen also added an aspect of social control -- because
anything said in the chat room was displayed openly, it helped keep
the conversation on-topic. Curiously, this seemed to be true even
though most of the room was reading the contents of the chat on their
laptop screens. The plasma screen created a public feeling without
actually exposing the contents to a "public" different from the
attendees.

During a brief post-mortem, several users reported using the plasma
screen for chunking, so that they could mainly pay attention to the
speaker, but flash their eyes to the screen occasionally to see what
was in the chat room, taking advantage of the fact that most people
read much faster than most speakers talk. (Viz. the horror of the
speaker who puts up a PowerPoint page, and then reads
each point.)

There were two bits of organizational structure that also helped
shape the meeting. The first was our adoption of Jerry Michalski's
marvelous "Red Card/Green Card" system, where participants were given
a set of colored cards about 20 cm square in three colors, red, green,
and gray. The cards were used to make explicit but non-verbal
commentary on what was being said at the time. A green card indicates
strong assent, red strong dissent, and gray confusion.

In an earlier experiment with ARSC, Greg added virtual cards; users
could click on red or green icons and have those added to the chat.
This proved unsatisfying, and for this meeting we went back to the use
of physical cards. The use of the cards to indicate non-verbal and
emotive reactions seemed to provide a nice balance with the verbal and
less emotive written material. At one point, we spent half an hour in
conversation with the only rule being "No talking." The entire room
was chatting for 30 minutes, and even in that situation, people would
physically wave green cards whenever anyone posted anything
particularly worthy in the chat room.

While the no-talking experiment was interesting, it was not
particularly useful. One of the participants whose work was being
discussed in the chat (he had just finished talking when we entered
the no-talking period) reported missing the actual verbal feedback
from colleagues. The chat comments made about his ideas, while cogent,
lacked the emotional resonance that makes face-to-face meetings
work. By enforcing the no-talking rule, we had re-created some of the
disadvantages of virtual meetings in a real room.

The other bit of organizational structure was borrowed from Elliott
Maxwell and the Aspen Institute, where participants wanting to speak
would turn their name cards vertically, thus putting comments in a
queue. This was frustrating for many of the participants, who had to
wait several minutes to react to something. This also severely altered
interrupt logic. (At several points, people gave up their turn to
speak, saying "the moment has passed.") Despite the frustration it
caused, this system kept us uncovering new material as opposed to
going down rat holes, and it made the chat room an attractive
alternative for saying something immediate.

THE DISADVANTAGES

Though we found ARSC to be a useful addition to the meeting, there was
an unusually good fit between the tool and the environment. For every
favorable bit of context listed above, there is a situation where an
in-room chat channel would be inappropriate. Meetings where the
attention to the speaker needs to be more total will be problematic,
as will situations where a majority of the audience is either not
connected or uncomfortable with chat.

Even in this group not everyone had a laptop, and for those people,
the chat contents were simply a second channel of information which
they could observe but not effect. Absolute ubiquity of the necessary
hardware is some ways off for even tech-savvy groups, and several
years away at least for the average group. Any meeting wanting to
implement a system like this will have to take steps to make the chat
optional, or to provide the necessary hardware where it is lacking.

It may also be that increasing phone/PDA fusion will actually reduce
the number of laptops present at meetings. Using social tools at event
where phones are the personal device of choice will require
significant additional thought around the issues of small screens,
thumb keyboards, and other ergonomic issues.

In-room chat is unlikely to be useful for small groups (fewer than a
dozen, at a guess), and its usefulness for groups larger than 30 may
also be marginal (though in that case, ways of providing multiple chat
rooms may be helpful.)

Given that the most profound effects of the chat were in changing
interrupt logic, many of the downsides came from the loss of
interruption as a tool. As annoying as interruptions may be, they help
keep people honest, by placing a premium on brevity, and on not
spinning castles in the air. Without interruption, the speaker loses
an important feedback mechanism, and may tend towards long-winded and
unsupported claims. At the very least, the use of in-room chat puts a
premium on strong moderation of some sort, to make up for the
structural loss of interruption.

Perhaps most importantly, it will almost certainly be unhelpful for
groups that need to function as a team. Because the two-track
structure encourages a maximum number of new and tangential items
being placed together, it would probably be actively destructive for
groups where consensus was a goal. As Steven Johnson has noted
about the event, the chat room moved most of the humor from real
world interjections to network ones, which preserved the humor but
suppressed the laughter. (Most of then time when people write 'lol',
they aren't.) Though this helps on the "interrupt logic" front, it
also detracts from building group cohesion.

NEXT STEPS

This experiment was relatively small and short, having been applied to one
group over two days. It would be interesting to know what the effect would
be for groups meeting for longer periods. On the first day, we averaged
not quite 3 1/2 posts a minute, occasionally spiking to 9 or 10. On the
second day, the average rose to just over 4 posts a minute, but the spikes
didn't change, suggesting that users were becoming more accustomed to a
steady pace of posting.

During the half-hour of chat only/no talking out loud, the average
nearly tripled, to over 11 posts a minute, and occasionally spiking to
18, suggesting that during the normal sessions, users were paying what
Linda Stone calls "continuous partial attention" to both the chat room
and the real room, and with the strictures of the real room
artificially suppressed, the chat room exploded. (The question of
whether the change in posting rate was uniform among all users is
difficult to answer with the small sample data.)

Several additional experiments suggest themselves.

- For conferences whose sessions average no more than 30 users, having
each room assigned its own chat channel could let users listening to the
same talk find one another with little effort. Likewise, finding ways of
forking large groups into multiple chats might be worthwhile, whether
using specific characteristics (UI Designers in one, Information
Architects in another and so on) or arbitrary ones (even or odd date of
birth) to keep the population of any one channel in the 12-25 range. (The
lack of plasma screen as a public mediating factor might be an issue.)

- ARSC translates URLs into clickable links. This suggests other regular
expressions that could be added. A: plus an author name or T: plus a title
could be turned into Amazon lookups. A QuoteBot might be very useful, as
several times during the two days someone asked "Who said 'Let the
wild rumpus start'?" A social network analysis bot might be
interesting, logging things like most and least frequent posters, and
social clustering, and reflecting those back to the group. (Cameron Marlow
of blogdex wrote a simple program during the meeting to display the number
of chat posts per user.)

- The social network angle, of course, is hampered by the lack of
threading in chat. This is obviously a hard problem, but several
people wondered whether there might be a lightweight way to indicate
who you are responding to, to create rudimentary threading. This may
be a problem best fixed socially. If we had asked people to adopt the
general irc convention of posting with the name of the recipient
first, ("greg: interesting idea, but almost certainly illegal"), we
might have gotten much better implicit threading. This in turn would
have been greatly helped by tab-completion of nicknames in ARSC.

- The whisper function is secret, rather than private. In a real meeting,
seeing who is having a side conversation can allow the group as a whole to
feel the overall dynamic, so a private \whisper function might be an
interesting addition, entering lines into the chat like "Clay whispers
to Cameron," but providing no information about the content of those
conversations.

- Likewise, it might make useful to flag interesting or relevant posts
for later review. If someone says something particularly cogent, other
users could click a link next to the post labled "Archive me", and in
addition to appearing in the general log, such posts would go to a
second 'flagged comments only' log.

- Greg provided a polling function, but you had to click off the chat
page to get there, and it was only used once, as a test. Given this
failure, polling and voting functions may need to appear directly in the chat
room to be useful. Bots are an obvious interface to do this as well. A
PollingBot could ask questions in the chat room and accepts answers by
\whisper.

- Given that meetings generally involve people looking at similar
issues from different backgrounds, DCC-like user-to-user file transfer
might be a valuable tool for sharing background materials among the
participants, by letting them send local files as well as URLs over
the chat interface.

- We got close to the edge of irc-style chaos, where the chat scrolls by
too fast to read it. A buffering chat channel might solve this problem, by
having some maximum rate set on the order of 120-150 words a minute, and
then simply delaying posts that go over that limit into the next minute,
and so on. This congestion queuing would let everyone say what they want
to say without dampening the ability of other participants to take it all
I before reaction.

- Finally, ARSC is server-based. With zeroconf networking, it might be
possible to set up ad hoc peer-to-peer networks of laptops without
needing to coordinate anything in advance. Likewise, while DCC-ish
file transfer might be valuable for person-to-person file sharing, the
ability to post "I have a draft of my article on my hard drive at such
and such a local address" and have that material be as accessible as
if it were on the web would make public sharing of background
materials much easier.

CONCLUSION

Real world groups are accustomed to having tools to help them get their
work done -- flipcharts, white boards, projectors, and so on. These tools
are typically used by only one person at a time. This experiment
demonstrated the possibility of social tools, tools that likewise aid a
real-world group, but which are equally accessible to all members at the
same time. There are a number of other experiments one can imagine, from
using the chat to accept input from remote locations, to integrating
additional I/O devices such as cameras or projectors. The core
observation, though, is that under certain conditions, groups can find
value in participating in two simultaneous conversation spaces, one real
and one virtual.